YHL Posers

At last I have the Young House Love book that I've been drooling over since it was released in November! I got it for Christmas...and this is ridiculous, but I for real almost cried.

Anyway...moving on from that.

Philip and I were reading it before bed each night and then we started post-it noting any projects we wanted to try. The hooks on page 145, idea #96 seemed manageable, and we were wanting to hang hooks behind our bedroom door for our robes anyway so we thought we'd try this project.

At first we were definitely at odds with our design concept. I had hoped for a cute patterned background (similar to what was shown in the book) and a solid letter, using white and green primarily. Our duvet is green so I thought bright green hooks or letters could be cute. Philip didn't like that idea at all, but I didn't like his ideas either, he wanted the canvas to stay mostly white. Eventually one of us suggested (I honestly don't remember who - I think it might have been a hybrid of me suggesting a stripe in the shape of an arrow and Philip taking the idea and running with it) painting silver arrow stripes downward (as the hooks will be hanging below) and then painting the letter green.

We started with using Frog Tape (best for crisp lines) to mark an arrow shape on our canvasses.

We painted between the tape with silver paint.

Love how the background looks, simple and pretty.

We painted the letters green with light green sides. They looked okay. In between you see the hooks we are going to recycle from downstairs, just need a little paint!

Halfway through painting the letter we also decided to lighten the green and paint the outsides of the letter the lighter shade. Cool right? Definitely cool, for a 16 year old girl or a college student's locker. Once it was finished, Philip pointed out how juvenile it looked, and now I can't stop seeing it that way either. I actually do still really like the arrows pointing down I think, I like the addition of the metallic, especially since our room turned out much more glam than our inspiration photo had suggested, the metallic would add to that vibe. So we'll see what we do now. We're either going to spray paint over the whole thing white and see how that looks - hoping it's nice like our white clock we bought on our honeymoon. Or, if we don't like that, at least we've got it back to square one and we can add color again if we want.

DIY Gift: Date Jar

As hinted in yesterday's post, we added a little DIY flavor to our Christmas gifts to each other this year. My homemade gift for Philip was the Pinterest-famous Date Jar. The first place I saw them was here. 

Life in the Green House Date Jar Inspiration

This was a pretty elementary craft, finished in a couple of hours, minus the time I had spent thinking up date ideas throughout the week before which was more scattered and not really dedicated time. 

I started out getting a jar from my mom's house. I cut out a piece of paper for the top to cover the expiry date (popsicle sticks with words on them don't expire - fancy that). On the paper I wrote what the different colored sticks would mean. 

After shopping with the intention of buying popsicle sticks and paint, I could only find already colored popsicle sticks which actually saved a lot of time. I used blue for Winter dates, yellow for Summer, and green for anytime. Then I painted the tips of any dates that cost money with white. This way when we go to pick we can pick something more specific to what we're wanting to do that day. 

Date Night Examples:

• Movie Night: His Choice
• Go to a restaurant we've never been to
• Make a craft together
• Make dinner together
• Pick out a 5 dollar item each from Superstore to make a surprise date night
• Build a snowman

Philip appreciated the thought that went into it, and it was fun and easy to make. It will hopefully also save us some time every time we want to have a date night and don't have any ideas. 

I have some pictures of it, but for some reason my iPhone decided to crash today...not too sure what will happen with that. Hopefully we can get it up and running tonight and it doesn't cost a fortune. I will add some real pictures tomorrow hopefully, but until then, this I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-photograph illustration should tide you over.

Update: Phone randomly fixed itself, so here's some photos!

Finished date jar!

60 popsicle stick date ideas!

Also be sure to head to the Facebook page and answer our weekly poll! We want to hear all about your New Years Resolutions or plans for 2013, and we'll share ours as well next week.